New Blender Release!

I finally got around to downloading the new Blender 2.5 alpha release and so far it’s pretty neat.

First up, they’ve completely redone all of the menus and UI. They also moved everything around which is initially confusing. Since all of the menus are move and customizable, I moved things back to my liking. Originally the main settings and stuff were on the lower half of the screen with the 3D world on the top half; in the new Blender it’s more or less left and right. I left the options in the left and right set up because despite being weird to navigate initially, I think it might be more efficient in the future.

The world seems to be about the same, so far. Nothing new that I’ve found, anyway.

Rendering will be updated towards the end of the 1.5 build, but already they’ve added indirect lighting as a sort of bonus add on to ambient occlusion; now light bounces. I haven’t tried yet, but I wonder if it will do colour bleeding and radiocity as well…

It just occurred to me, I wonder if it’ll work with Yafaray in the alpha release. Ah well, eventually either Blender will fit Yafaray or Yafaray will upgrade to fit the new Blender in release.

Cool.

So, I won’t be leaving 2.49 any time soon, but it’s a cool development for the Blender community.